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Fabrication and Testing of Photonic Thermometers
Published on: October 24, 2018
Role of topology in determining the precision of a finite thermometer
Alessandro Candeloro1, Luca Razzoli2, Paolo Bordone2,3
1Quantum Technology Lab, Dipartimento di Fisica Aldo Pontremoli, Università degli Studi di Milano, I-20133 Milan, Italy.
Abstract:
Temperature fluctuations of a finite system follow the Landau bound δT^{2}=T^{2}/C(T) where C(T) is the heat capacity of the system. In turn, the same bound sets a limit to the precision of temperature estimation when the system itself is used as a thermometer. In this paper, we employ graph theory and the concept of Fisher information to assess the role of topology on the thermometric performance of a given system. We find that low connectivity is a resource to build precise thermometers working at low temperatures, whereas highly connected systems are suitable for higher temperatures. Upon modeling the thermometer as a set of vertices for the quantum walk of an excitation, we compare the precision achievable by position measurement to the optimal one, which itself corresponds to energy measurement.
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